Kinect-powered augmented reality sandbox is better than what you grew up with

One of the well known traits of geeks the world over is the fact that most all of us have an inner-child that comes out when we see something incredibly cool. A perfect example of something falls into that category is a Kinect-powered augmented reality sandbox. Created by a research team at UC Davis, the AR sandbox projects a topographical map, complete with moving water, on top of the hills and valleys you create.

Led by Peter Gold, the AR sandbox project was started with the goal of creating an interactive display for science museums to help teach patrons about freshwater and the watershed in relation to topography.

Funded by the NSF, the AR sandbox when finished is going to be an open-source project that you can build yourself at home! All that you will need is a digital projector, Microsoft’s Kinect device, and a computer to run the software necessary for generating the real-time maps.

The setup for the sandbox is deceptively simple. The 3D camera, which is the Kinect in this case, takes real-time images that are fed to the computer to be processed. As with most software all the heavy lifting is done in a way that’s transparent to the user, which masks the true complexity of the computations that are used to make a project like this work.

Gold and his team employed the Vrui VR development toolkit in conjunction with the Kinect 3D processing framework to create the land features you saw in the video above. While this was a relatively simple task, what posed a challenge to the team was employing water flow simulations. For this they turned to the Saint-Venant set of shallow water equations (a set of hyperbolic equations, they are used to describe the flow that happens below the pressure surface in fluids).

Gold’s team took the equations and applied them to the different levels of topography so that the software is able to create realistic flows of water that move in relationship to the hills and valleys you create with your hand or shovel. As you saw in the video, the team certainly succeeded in creating some awesome visuals that will entertain children of all ages, while at the same time actually learning something.

Once the project is open-sourced, it should be relatively easy to create one of your own. Digital projectors have come way down in price, so you could conceivably build one for your children (although we know who it’s really for) for a small amount of money.